Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Operation Golden Phoenix

This week, Dataline is participating in Operation Golden Phoenix. Operation Golden Phoenix is a four-day multi-agency collaborative training event designed to assist federal, state and local agencies with large and complex incident response scenarios. The exercise implements FEMA's concept of an all-hazards approach to emergency management fostering every level of government to partner to achieve common goals. It's designed to integrate emergency management planning into mainstream policy-making and operational systems. The lead agency for Golden Phoenix '08 is U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Many national and international participants and observers from over 100 federal agencies will attend. These include DHS, DOD (U.S. Navy), DEA, FBI, DOJ, DOE, Marine Corps Reserve, California National Guard, NGOs and industry partners.

During the exercise, a backpack-sized, Dataline solar powered mobile communications kit (http://www.dataline.com/products.htm) will be used to provide multi-path access to a MEDWEB (http://www.medweb.com/) telemedicine infrastructure. This will be a field test of the communications kit that features mobile, fast, reliable, secure communications capabilities over multiple WAN technologies as a telemedicine tool. During the exercise, patient registration tracking and triage system with subspecialty telemedicine reach back capabilities, and HL7/DICOM integration will be demonstrated.

This exercise is an example of how cloud computing techniques and infrastructures can be use to improve mission effectiveness in the national security arena. Successful deployment and employment of this type of capability in a joint DoD/DHS cloud can lead the way to enhanced homeland security.